Heres Where Your Restaurant Tip Really Goes

When you tip someone, do you really know where those dollars are going? When someone at the deli makes you a bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll and you throw a dollar into the Styrofoam cup by the cash register, you assume it goes to the person who cooked it. Or does it go to the cashier who took your order? If you give $5 to the person who carried your luggage to your hotel room, is that money being shared with others?

At restaurants it’s even confusing, and if you’ve never worked in one, you probably have no idea how that tip is divided among so many people. There are tip-outs, tip poolsand all kinds of tipping conundrums that most customers have no knowledge of.

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How tip pooling works

When a server receives a tip, generally speaking, a good portion goes to various supporting staff throughout the restaurant. It’s rare that the entirety of the tip goes solely to the server. I worked at an upscale Mexican restaurant for a few days, and one of the reasons I decided to quit was because of how much of the tips I made went to others. I had to pay 5% of my tips to the coffee lady, 5% to the guacamole guy, 15% to the busser, and another 15% to the food runner. Forty percent of my tips went to support staff because the restaurant hired pretty much everyone as tipped employeesso their payroll was as minimal as possible.

Another reason I left that job was because one of my coworkers had seen me do a production ofThe Full Montya year earlier, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of working with someone who had seen me in a pair of tighty-whities and less. That, and giving $10 a night to someone making tableside guacamole even if none of my tables ordered guacamole was too much.

Tip pooling is when everyone who works in the restaurant throws their tips into the same giant bucket, and at the end of the day, it gets tallied out to eligible employees who are working. (This is different from tip sharing or tipping out, where servers keep their own tips but share a set percentage with support staff.) The thing with a tip pool is that it’s not that different from a public pool. It only takes one person to make that pool something you definitely do not want to swim in.

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When I worked at a small restaurant where there were just three of us on the floor —  two servers and a bartender — it was a great setup. It made us work as a team, and the restaurant was small enough that we could always see if someone was slacking off. Another pooled-tip restaurant I worked in was not as ideal. The tips were divided among at least 30 people, and there was a complex formula based on how many minutes you were at work to ensure everyone got the right amount of money.

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Is tip pooling fair?

I never trusted it. There were too many slackers leaning on the hard workers, and it seemed blatantly unfair. When I began to vocalize my thoughts about the situation, I was unceremoniously fired for “not being a good fit.” The only time tip pooling works is if everyone in the pool trusts each other and does an equal amount of work. A lazy person in a tip pool is happier than a pig in a puddle of mud.

As a customer, you really have no idea how much of the tip is going to the person who served you. Even if you hand them a $10 bill and expressly say, “This is just for you,” in a pooled house, the right thing to do is for that server to add that money to the pot. Most servers are accustomed to and happy to share a portion of their tips with support staff because servers know they can’t do their job without the help of others.

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The tipping culture in our country is confusing. In a perfect world, everyone working in a restaurant would be paid a living wage, and customers wouldn’t be expected to supplement their salary. But that’s not where we are. A tip is for much than the person who took your order, and when it comes to tipping, all a server wants is what they have coming to them. All they want is their fair share.